Contents

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.

Claudine and Annie (1903)

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Freedom (1908)

Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.

L'Envers du music hall (Music Hall Sidelights), "On Tour" (1913)

Her childhood, then her adolescence, had taught her patience, hope, silence and the easy manipulation of the weapons and virtues of all prisoners.

Chéri (1920) pt. 2

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

My Mother’s House, "The Priest on the Wall" (1922)

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

La Fin de Chéri (The Last of Cheri) (1926)

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

Break of Day (1928)

Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shrivelled innocence of an old maid?

Sido (1929)

We only do well the things we like doing.

Prisons and Paradise (1932)

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.

Mes Apprentissages (1936)

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

Mes Apprentissages (1936)

But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.

Chambre d’Hôtel, "The Rainy Moon" (1940)

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

Paris From My Window (1944)

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

Paris From My Window (1944)

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

Noces (1945)

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

Chance Acquaintances (1952)

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

New York World-Telegram and Sun (1961)

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.

Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

Speech on being elected to the Belgian Academy, as quoted in “Lady of Letters” Pt. 4, Earthly Paradise (autobiography, 1966) ed. Robert Phelps

There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.

“Wedding Day”, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!

“Sido and I”, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

"The Captain", Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

“The South of France”, Earthly Paradise (1966) ed. Robert Phelps

It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.

Journey for Myself (1971) “Beauties,” Quatre Saisons (c. 1928).

For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance.

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

Ch. 9

Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken.

Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: “It’s four o’clock … At five I have my abyss.”

Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.

The Photographer’s Wife

On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath.

The Photographer’s Wife

Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.

Aunt Alicia

Boredom helps one to make decisions.

Aunt Alicia

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men... nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us — oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings.

Toby-Dog: It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling.Kiki-The-Demure: A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand.Toby-Dog: That's wrong. It's indiscreet.Kiki-The-Demure: Not at all. I have a right to everything.Toby-Dog: To everything? And I?Kiki-The-Demure: I don't imagine you lack anything, do you?Toby-Dog: Ah, I don't know. Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come...Kiki-The-Demure: And then what dreadful thing happens?Toby-Dog: You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it — Castor Oil!

Kiki-The-Demure: Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic. Toby-Dog: I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath.

I am devoted to those who endured, like Colette. It is easier … to kiss the world a bitter goodbye than to go on working, writing, changing, enduring the slings & arrows of outrageous aging. Colette endured. And she wrote & wrote & wrote. Whenever I feel really depressed, I think of her & keep going.